The Shrinking Man (aka The Incredible Shrinking Man) by Richard Matheson is a notable classic with good reason. What makes Matheson’s brand of incredibly invented sci-fi is his ability to tap into raw, honest and captivating emotion, and this example is no different. While on the surface it presents the horror of a man gradually diminishing in size, a little each day, it’s compounded by the nature of the character, Scott Carey, who is very highly strung. When faced with losing his stature, he becomes increasingly angry and sexually frustrated, giving a unique sense of rage to the whole shrinking scenario. It works as a treatise on the fragility of masculinity in general, and how the boundaries shift: by the end, Carey’s biggest goal is to defeat a spider in combat, to preserve some sense of worth, after he’s been infantalised by his family and proved unable to do even the most basic tasks.
Women in The Shrinking Man
Where do women come into this tale? Principally, it’s with the presence of Carey’s wife and daughter. There’s a fair bit of interaction between the shrinking man and his increasingly huge wife, but it’s got a particular kind of cruelty to it in that Carey sees his manhood slipping away, feeling increasingly seen as a child (even if he imagines part of this). He resents being cared for and carried, and it creates tension as he tries to keep things romantic with his wife when she’s two or three times his size. Indeed, most of the human interaction occurs when he’s at various child-sized proportions, and likewise he’s at a foot or so high when he finally does give in to his sexual urges – with a diminutive circus performer. He’s also visits the male doctor, and at a tiny height spies guiltily on his daughter’s babysitter and, even smaller, encounters a man coming into the cellar where he’s trapped.
Scale in this novel is treated as something truly frightening, though in terms of the interaction between people the danger is more a threat to respect than in people actually harming Carey. It makes for a fascinating story, tense and uncomfortable, with a heavy credence on the reality of this terrible fate, and how it challenges the male ego – though you won’t find a great deal of excitement from him being handled by people!
